Perfect Pathhttp://perfectpath.co.uk
I'm the founder of the Tuttle Club and fascinated by organisation. I enjoy making social art and building communities, if you'd like some help from me feel free to e-mail me: Lloyd dot Davis at Gmail dot Com or call +44 (0)79191 82825Thu, 30 Jul 2015 20:51:12 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngPerfect Pathhttp://perfectpath.co.uk
Ongoing Support for #Tuttle through @Patreonhttp://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/07/30/ongoing-support-for-tuttle-through-patreon/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/07/30/ongoing-support-for-tuttle-through-patreon/#commentsThu, 30 Jul 2015 20:39:18 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2259Continue reading Ongoing Support for #Tuttle through @Patreon→]]>

So, #Tuttle turned 7 years old, six months ago. There have been times when I’ve walked away from it and let others carry the show, but for most of those seven years, I’ve been showing up every week and helping something beautiful happen.

The conversations these days are not so much about social media, they’re more about how work is changing right now and how technology is affecting that. And just like when we started in 2008, growth in our technological capacity is outstripping our social capacity to understand and deal with it. We don’t know how it’s all going to work out. And free-form conversation like you get at #Tuttle is the best way I know to address that situation.

During the last seven years, many of you have supported my projects through crowd-funding and by participating directly in them. I’m grateful for all of that. I thought that #Tuttle would lead to new stuff and it has done, but the thing itself, the Friday morning meetups haven’t gone away. Now I’m asking you to support the ongoing work of keeping #Tuttle useful and expanding the range of activities I can do.

Patreon has been around for a while now as a platform. It does all the bits that are difficult for me to do on my own and lets me get on with making cool stuff happen. I’m hoping that it will also help me to do more to hold the community together – that’s what the Goals in the left-hand sidebar are about. The process has also helped me to get clear about what I want to do – summarised in this video.

It’s not make or break. I’m going to keep doing this stuff because it’s my calling, it’s become who I am and every time someone comes back or turns up for the first time and I see that look in their eye, that says “Thank you for making a space for me to be nourished in today”, I know that I’ve just got to keep doing it.

Most importantly of all, if you can’t afford to give anything, the best thing you can do is send me a note of solidarity and maybe come and see me on a Friday morning, I need you much more than I need your money.

There’s (at least) one question in every important relationship, whether it’s your lover, your mother, your best mate or your favourite client, which can trigger the most almighty meltdown of communication. Something that seems to be taking a lifetime to resolve. Something that presses her buttons and presses yours just as hard. You know what it is. He knows what it is. You both know not to touch it, but every now and then one of you forgets and drifts into this dangerous territory.

Whatever it is you are unlikely to resolve it by talking it out just one more time. It represents something important that needs to be worked out through your experience of relating to each other, not through words. So, no matter how tempting it seems when they say “I know we’ve been over this, but could we just…” Smile, remind them (and yourself) that you love them and get on with being the solution not trying to explain it.

]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/07/13/that-question-the-answer/feed/1Lloyd DavisIMAG1572Here’s what I did the day after 7/7http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/07/09/heres-what-i-did-the-day-after-77/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/07/09/heres-what-i-did-the-day-after-77/#commentsThu, 09 Jul 2015 14:05:33 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2251Continue reading Here’s what I did the day after 7/7→]]>https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2098876/PPPodcasts/podwalk015.mp3

It’s a bit slow to start and despite my protestations that “It’s really quiet for a Friday” there’s plenty of background traffic noise, but I’m really quite proud of ten years ago me, stepping out and doing what was normal for me (but seemed bonkers to most), walking around London talking into a recording machine and publishing what I’d said on the internet.

We had no Twitter that day, or Facebook. YouTube was a couple of months old and video still seemed out of reach to me. Most of us had phones whose only non-voice function was SMS. The photos that I took and put on flickr were taken with my Pentax Optio compact. All I had was my blog and a podcast.

The day before I’d been at home waiting in for an engineer to come and install my broadband and TV. And so when I could I got back into town and carried on and tried to talk about forgiveness and peace.

]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/07/09/heres-what-i-did-the-day-after-77/feed/2Lloyd DavisEaten By Code, Replaced By Robots?http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/07/06/eaten-by-code-replaced-by-robots/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/07/06/eaten-by-code-replaced-by-robots/#commentsMon, 06 Jul 2015 14:44:25 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2249Continue reading Eaten By Code, Replaced By Robots?→]]>I’ve put a proposal to write an article for Contributoria on the possibility of city workers being hit hard by the next round of FinTech development – Bitcoin brought us programmable money, Ethereum brings us programmable companies.

From the pitch: “is it reasonable to expect Financial and Professional Services to undergo the same kinds of disruption and rejigging that the web brought to film, TV, newspapers and music? And if so what happens to all the people who ‘do something in the City’?”

Contributoria is a journalism site where the articles are written, chosen and collaborated on by members of the community. In my opinion, it’s managing to inspire and curate some really good writing on subjects that you won’t necessarily see in more mainstream media. The choosing function is like crowd-funding but you allocate points that you get through membership rather than your own actual cash, but if enough of you give me your points, I get to write the article and I get paid. You may remember that I was interviewed for one of Jon Hickman’s pieces there about a year ago.

So it’s like all those other crowd-funding things I’ve asked you to support, but this one won’t cost you anything, instead you get to play with the Guardian Media Group’s money – yay!

Here’s what you do:

Sign up at contributoria.com – you’ll see that there are paid options (including one that gets you a print copy, if that floats your boat) but you get 50 points to play with if you go for FREE.

Pledge as many of your points to me as you like (obviously I would like all 50 please!)

Tell all your friends to do the same (there are handy social share buttons for FB & Twitter)

If you’ve any left over do have a browse of the other articles being proposed and pledge for them too.

Sit back and wait till the end of the month when you can start to read my drafts and guide my writing if you like, or wait until it’s published on 1st September.

Also, probably get ready for me to ask you to ask all your friends again toward the end of the month, when I’m frustratingly close but not quite at the target!

Thanks my lovelies!

]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/07/06/eaten-by-code-replaced-by-robots/feed/4Lloyd DavisWhat was all that about? #llobohttp://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/06/30/what-was-all-that-about-llobo/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/06/30/what-was-all-that-about-llobo/#commentsTue, 30 Jun 2015 17:11:50 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2247Continue reading What was all that about? #llobo→]]>Four years ago today, I sat in the park with my new girlfriend (now my wife), kissed her for the first time and then walked over to C4CC to pick up the suitcase, laptop bag and ukulele that would be my items of stability over the next year while I experimented with living with friends, colleagues and strangers.

I used this blog to tell you what I’d been doing but also to say “Hi, I’m here, but I’m ready to be somewhere else, do you have some work I could do?” It was a great exercise, a stretch for me. I gained humility and confidence in the value of my work. I learned how to ask for what I needed and I learned about what happens when you present yourself as in need. Throughout the year, people assumed that openly asking for help like this equated to helplessness. And then I experienced three basic forms of reaction:

Identification: “Yes, I feel helpless about this too.”

Rescue: “Oh you poor thing, let me sort you out.”

Attack: “You lazy bastard, get a job like everyone else.”

It’s a well-recognised and strong dynamic. But the year, in the end, turned out to be a daily practice to step out of the whole drama triangle dynamic, to let go of being helpless and with it let go of being bashed or rescued.

]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/06/30/what-was-all-that-about-llobo/feed/1Lloyd DavisTomorrow’s Worldhttp://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/06/18/tomorrows-world/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/06/18/tomorrows-world/#commentsThu, 18 Jun 2015 13:07:18 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2245Continue reading Tomorrow’s World→]]>A couple of months ago at Tuttle, Vinay expounded on his recommended VC strategy: invest in any startup whose product combines two or more of the following –

virtual reality;

weak artificial intelligence;

drones & robots; and

blockchain.

It’s been rolling around in my head ever since. Of those people who are working on any of these, I think they’re mostly focused on a single silo as core – so when a VR company does something controlling drones, they’re probably just using drones as a use case rather than thinking “We’re in the Virtual Reality Drone Business.”

I think. I don’t know enough of them to know.

But I do think this stuff is worth knowing more about because they all feel like unstoppable strands of the near-future. They all feel like the internet did twenty years ago – yes you’ve heard of them, you know people are doing stuff with them but what really is that going to do for me? And the combinations with other technologies are quite hard to think about because of this. Even fifteen years ago the people saying that the future of the internet was mobile phones seemed to be few, probably right, but possibly nuts.

Here’s what I think is interesting about each.

Virtual Reality: means we can visualise and interact in some way with stuff that doesn’t or can’t exist in reality or we can make things that do exist look different, easier to interact with or more palatable. Using sensors in the real world we can also mix things up, what we call “augmented reality”

Drones & Robots: I heap these together with devices on the network whose primary function is not computing (or computing as we know it) they are machines that do stuff for us and replace some part of undesirable human labour, ultimately allowing us to do stuff we just could barely imagine before.

Artificial Intelligence: the “weak” modifier is important here, we’re not talking about sentient computers, rather things like voice recognition, machine translation, helpers like siri. This is the software version of human-replacing robots. Get a machine or a network of machines to replace some thinking-like function: decision making or sensory recognition or pattern matching.

Blockchain tech has started off by replacing currencies, but it’s becoming clear that the generalised form of bitcoin – a distributed ledger that gets its authority from the consensus of the network is a candidate for replacing all sorts of centralised databases and thus making all sorts of human activities in firms look horribly inefficient and redundant. The best corporations may turn out to have been relatively inefficient cyborg machines weighed down by their meatware compared to a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation.

Within these silos, each of these technologies are on the road to being mainstream – it’s those combinations that make me think. A robot that senses and makes decisions about its environment through a virtual reality interface but ultimately controlled by a DAO sounds Terminator-ish.

But there’s another thing.

In all technology, we face a tension between our desire to make life easier by replacing human labour with code or machines and our attachment to human labour as the primary sense-making tool of life and the means by which most of us get the things we need to live.

We seem to understand that work is changing but most of the #futureofwork stuff I’ve seen assumes capitalism based on corporations as a given.

I do have an opinion on this, I think we need fewer jobs and to really accept that people don’t need any more to work as hard or as long doing stuff to justify staying alive. What I want to do more though is point out the incongruity that our tech efforts go into replacing human labour but our politics, culture and society, our communities and social interactions assume that everyone should have a job or some easily understandable means of income like owning or a company or assets that create value.

I spent a year a little while ago not living how most people live. I lived out of a couple of suitcases and moved around, asking for work and places to stay through my social networks. More than once I was asked “What if everyone wanted to live like this?” At the time, I took this as an admonishment mostly, as a way of saying “You’re taking advantage of our work which has gone into acquiring this space for our use. You’re working and storing it in social capital rather than in bricks and mortar or a career path, but we can’t all do that can we?”

Well, what I’m asking now is “What if we all have to do that?” What if we make a huge leap in replacing types of work? What if, in the British economy, we made things that made our Financial and Professional Services as “not economically viable here” as coal-mining, steel work or mass manufacturing – the things that were the cornerstones of our economy when I was a child?

Whatever happens, it will be in the context of big demographic change too. A lot of the way our bit of the world looks is down to the post-war baby boom. All the boomers are over fifty now. They’re going to die in the next twenty, thirty, forty years (me too!)

How’s it all going to work out? Is this all what we really want? Would knowing how the world is now have helped us at all forty years ago? Can we just pause and check?

I think we need to talk a lot more about these things. Tuttle is one place, but I’m going to be making time for other ways to engage over the next few months. Please join me.

I went to the EthereumMeetup last night. A suitably informal tuttle-ish mess of conversations about blockchain applications. Developers, startup founders and me, the social artist elephant in the room, wondering what this all means for the milling crowds of financial services workhorses I’d just passed through at Liverpool St Station.

It’s early enough for the “scene” to fit into the upstairs room of an Aldgate pub. And the talk reminds me of the way the web was in the mid-nineties. “All of this sounds great, it’s conceptually beautiful, but after working in a bank, actually running a business, trying to sell this stuff to people, it’s all just so messy!” said one participant.

It may be a long way off, but there is a feeling of inevitability about it, the way that it was obvious that our manufacturing industry would be replaced by some form of technology or sent somewhere else, but we just didn’t want to talk about it. I do feel a bit like someone standing in Longbridge in the late 1970s saying “You’re going to be a robot. You’re a robot. You’re a robot…”

]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/05/21/city-folk-eaten-by-code/feed/2Lloyd DavisWandering in the woodshttp://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/05/20/wandering-in-the-woods/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/05/20/wandering-in-the-woods/#commentsWed, 20 May 2015 12:08:54 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2240Continue reading Wandering in the woods→]]>I’m remembering after the relative structure of commuting to Sittingbourne for #workshop34 that just wandering is an important part of my practice – it’s a way of processing what’s been going on and that I have places to go locally that are great for reflection and self-restoration. I’m also cheered to remember that I carry some high-quality multi-media content production equipment everywhere I go.

So I denied myself a walk in the woods over the weekend but by Monday it was irresistible and when I got there, these words fell out of my mouth. Here’s video and audio for those who still subscribe to the podcatching form of distribution.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2098876/DoLessListenWait.mp3]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/05/20/wandering-in-the-woods/feed/0Lloyd Davis#tuttle tokenshttp://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/05/18/tuttle-tokens/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/05/18/tuttle-tokens/#commentsMon, 18 May 2015 10:04:48 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2238Continue reading #tuttle tokens→]]>“Tuttle is like networking but isn’t the kind of thing where you pass around your business cards”

There was a time when this was a radical statement. We were doing something new here by putting the focus on the personal relationship rather than the exchange of information. You come along, you talk to people, you have ideas, you go away together and do stuff. As opposed to: We meet, we exchange data, I give you a line in my database and hope that you’ll reciprocate, then our customer relationship management systems spam each other until one of us gives in.

I haven’t seen so many business cards on Friday mornings lately. But when we closed down C4CC I found that the kindly folk had been preserving my card collection and so it was one of the few things I took away at the end.

This weekend, I sat down to look at them all. Now, not all of these are from tuttle, I will have picked some up from other meetups or through working with people at C4CC but there’s a lot of them. I met a lot of people since 2008.

The first thing that jumps out is the weird branding choices we were making five or six years ago. Mainly in the form of oddly-spelled business names and kooky sounding job titles. I’m not going to single anyone out because we all did it in one form or another. I suppose it was part of a whole bunch of people creating their own personal brand for the first time through trial and error.

There were a lot of people who are now Facebook friends or whom I follow on Twitter. We’re connected, I can get in touch with them, I know who they are – was there a time when they had to give me their card?

And then there are the hundreds of people who I have no idea about at all, I don’t remember their name, I don’t remember their business, I kind of understand why I might have bumped into them, but the handing over of the business card was the last I knew of them (presumably because neither of our customer relationship management systems were that hot).

We talked about exchanging tokens last Friday. A general conversation about cryptocurrency turned into a more specific “What would a TuttleBuck be like, what would it be for, how would they be created, what would they be worth, how long would they last, would there be unexpected consequences?”

I’m interested in the idea of creating something that marks attendance and then seeing what happens to it. If you accumulate 20 Tuttlebucks in the next six months what would you do with them? It’s not meant as an incentive, it’s not for the purpose of increasing attendance, but wouldn’t it be interesting to see what effect it has? Which points me to thinking “What are the questions to ask when you’re creating a currency like this?” Because there are going to be a lot of them and we’re going to have to get used to dealing with other more sophisticated forms of contract than cash. Is there a checklist of things you have to think about?

]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/05/18/tuttle-tokens/feed/5Lloyd DavisPostmodernist Partieshttp://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/05/09/postmodernist-parties/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/05/09/postmodernist-parties/#commentsSat, 09 May 2015 09:07:19 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2236Continue reading Postmodernist Parties→]]>Not well thought through, but rattled off after a good night’s sleep – fill in the gaps and polish up for me, would you?

I’m noting that one issue is political parties’ separation from culture which means they’re unconsciously driven by cultural trends rather than being on top of them. Long words made shorter: this election was not a fight between political parties but between re-enactment societies. We were asked to choose between present-day representations of aspects of the 20th Century.

So Labour offered the Spirit of ’45 – the party of the NHS and the broader Welfare State. UKIP are Mosley’s blackshirt re-enactors, while the Tories and LibDems present the Downton Abbey tableau, respectively taking the stereotype roles of firm but fair toff and the wild idealistic toff. Actually the LibDems also still have a strong social democratic streak and so get blurred with some Wilson-esque “White Heat of Technology” stragglers. The Greens are probably the most present of the bunch but that’s just because it really is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius! Or something. Still, to most people they’re muesli-knitting Greenham Common protesters with an “Atomkraft? Nein Danke!” bumper sticker.

]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/05/09/postmodernist-parties/feed/0Lloyd DavisAbout Last Night…http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/05/08/about-last-night/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/05/08/about-last-night/#commentsFri, 08 May 2015 21:10:25 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2234Continue reading About Last Night…→]]>When the exit poll came in, I was just thinking of writing something here about the likelihood of a shock election result, given the filter bubble/echo chamber effects in social media. I didn’t know what the shock would be, but it seemed to me that my feed was so strongly in tune with what I was thinking that it was likely to be Facebook’s algorithm trying to make me happy rather than a true reflection of the polls.

And that’s as far as I got when the first shock came. It was like hearing something that sounded like a car crash outside your house just when you were expecting visitors – things slowed down as I raced (while marvelling at the haircuts and overall maleness of the BBC coverage) to understand what might have happened – surely it would be alright, don’t be silly, go to bed, it will all seem better in the morning. I stayed long enough to see the Tory win with only a tiny swing to Labour in my constituency. It was going to be bad.

It was. In the morning, the BBC was (correctly as it turned out) forecasting a Tory majority. This was really not what I’d expected. I hadn’t even thought of that as a likelihood, to me it had all been driven by the opinion polls pointing to a neck-and-neck race, so all the talk was about what compromises would have to be made. Now we know that the only compromises that will have to be made will be within the Tory party.

I thought, this morning that, I felt disappointed. But disappointments pass – I saw people pick themselves up, dust themselves down, start all over again, but I didn’t feel able to do that. I went to Tuttle and we picked over the bones of it – it was good to not be alone with my head. Then I walked all the way home and had a cry and had a sleep.

When I woke, I realised what I was feeling. It feels like grief. It feels like someone died.

It’s not quite grief for the Labour Party, that died for me in the early nineties, Blair never worked for me although I have continued to faithfully vote for them (and I still will until something better comes along). I’ve marveled at people who said they needed to think about who to vote for. I’m just not that sort of person and no amount of information, reasoning or shouting abuse will move me, save your energies for someone else.

No I think what I saw dying overnight was the Welfare State. We, as a country, voted against the Welfare State yesterday – the NHS is the most obvious part of that but, as a country, we said yes to the Bedroom Tax and no to a Mansion Tax. Saying “I believe in the Welfare State” used to sound ridiculous to me, as ridiculous as saying “I believe in sausages” – sausages just are, there’s no believe or not believe. And, in truth, the idea has been dying since 1979 but now it really feels like it’s gone. We’re going to have to come up with another way of looking after each other.

I can see the positive in there, because I’ve held on to ideas and behaviours that needed to die and eventually gone through the process of letting them go and finding that there’s something so much better on the other side, but I’m afraid of going through it and I’m afraid for other people who might not be as strong as I am.

We are going to have to come up with another way of looking after each other. Because the state isn’t going to do it and the market isn’t going to do it and the Big Society isn’t going to do it and if we don’t do this we stop being civilised.

Dougald wrote some great notes today. Including: “11. This is not just a battle of ideas, it is a battle for the soul.” For me, the root of this is “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”. Easy to say, hugely rewarding to practice, bloody hard (though not impossible) to do. There aren’t any quick and easy ways through this, but accepting that it’s here and that the solution is within us is the key.

In the meantime, I’m going to look after myself the best I can, talk about things, preferably in a more human way than writing blog posts and posting to Facebook, be as excellent as I can be to everyone around me. And I shall be looking out for those who are suffering too. Especially to anyone with mental health issues, disabilities or long-term illness who might feel like hope has gone, you’re not alone, we’ll get through this together.

]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/05/08/about-last-night/feed/2Lloyd DavisLiving in the futurehttp://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/05/02/living-in-the-future/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/05/02/living-in-the-future/#commentsSat, 02 May 2015 17:16:55 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2230Continue reading Living in the future→]]>I’m sitting here in my living room, listening to Louis Prima, recorded in 1956, somehow ending up on my phone and being played through my phone’s network connection to my television set. I’m typing on a computer that’s not much larger than an A4 pad of paper and you’re reading this wherever, however, whenever you might have made the mistake of clicking on a link or firing up your feed-reader.

I can also use my phone to watch TV versions of comics that I read as a child. I could probably, but don’t, get digital copies of those same comics to view on whichever device I choose.

I can find and play just about any piece of music recorded (just about) just by asking my computer and I can record my own music and make it available to you in the same way.

Wow! Still haven’t got over this. Wow!

I went to see the latest Avengers flick this week. I’d been looking forward to it but felt a bit dissatisfied at the end, it was a bit like Christmas, so much anticipation and it was fun while it lasted, but then… then well back to the future.

Every now and then I’ve seen artists asked “What do you think you’d be like if you’d had access to YouTube when you were a kid?” I have no idea. It would have been so different. How could I tell? I expect I’d be very different. I mean, all of the above is still wowing me but my way of interacting with culture through my teens was to engage intensely with a (relatively) small pool of stuff and to do so over and over again. Listening to records until I knew every note and cassettes until they literally wore out. Reading comics and novels over and over, finding more each time. Getting hugely excited by a re-run of some beloved TV or film. Let alone organising all free time around the contents of the Radio & TV Times.

Which I guess is why, when given the choice, I’m listening (again) to some Italian-American guy from 1956.

]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/05/02/living-in-the-future/feed/0Lloyd DavisHelp Please: #workshop34 Final Reporthttp://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/04/09/help-please-workshop34-final-report/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/04/09/help-please-workshop34-final-report/#commentsThu, 09 Apr 2015 18:38:54 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2226Continue reading Help Please: #workshop34 Final Report→]]>I’m writing a final report on the work I just did in Sittingbourne, opening and running a pop-up shop and co-working space in the High Street there as part of the EU-funded ReCreate project.

This is mostly a request for help from people who were familiar with or directly involved in the project, but I’m up for feedback from all sides. In fact, just writing that has helped me see that I’d like to make it much easier for people to read who had no exposure to the project at all, but that might be a longer-term goal than getting the final report submitted with the final invoice!

This section is meant to sum up the Key Successes. I’d like to know whether:

you agree that these are indeed the key successes – and if not what you’d add or take away;

you think there are better ways of saying what I’ve said;

you have better examples than the ones I’ve used to illustrate the success; or

any of it doesn’t make sense at all to you.

Or, y’know, anything else that would make it better.

Thank you!

Key Successes

Reactivating the High StreetWe made a difference to how the street felt to local people and to how people thought about using empty spaces.

Sittingbourne High Street has lots of empty shops, especially towards the eastern end where workshop34 was. We immediately brightened this area, simply by cleaning the exterior, removing fly-posting and putting the lights on. Once we opened the doors for business and hung the bright yellow sign above the doorway we made a real difference to the feel of that end of the street – many people would simply come in to see what was going on because they were so surprised to see anything happening there.

We had good relations with neighbouring shops from the start. The owner of one local jeweller visited in the first week and we got to know especially well the local cafe owners, encouraging shop users to buy their lunches, cakes and coffees in one of the three nearest ones.

We encouraged Belinda Gyampa, a local hairdresser specialising in African haircare, who had become a regular user of our shop first to visit and then take on one of the retail units for hire in the building opposite.

Led by CommunityMany spaces supported by ReCreate designed an offering and then fitted local people into it. We took the opposite approach – asking people what they wanted to do and then saying “Yes, do it!” As a result we squeezed a wider range of activities into the short time-frame than we might have otherwise done.

While we know a lot about what works in pop-up shops and creative collaboration spaces, we are also strongly committed to doing things with people rather than for or to them. During the month of November, Lloyd sat in the shop most days and simply talked to people about what they would like to do ithere. He almost always said “Yes! Please!”, partly because there was little time to be fussy and turn down stuff, but also knowing that only a small proportion of people would come back.

The other reason for giving power to the community from the start is that it makes it much easier at the end of the project. Lloyd works on the basis that the best success is when the group believes that they did most of it themselves.

We also wanted to break the dynamic of dependence – the cycle of someone with grant-funding coming and doing something for the community and then disappearing without empowering anyone doesn’t help in reactivating the High Street. So we stepped outside of giving people what (we think) is good for them and gave them what they wanted: space to work together, the power to decide and the power to change their mind if it didn’t work.

Building ConfidenceTogether we all grew in confidence as we tried things and they worked. Most obviously, some people showed and sold their creative work for the first time, but others benefited in more subtle ways.

Giving people the responsibility of deciding what to do and of delivering it means that they get to do things they might not have done before. Even those who had run or worked in the previous pop-ups gained from being able to focus on making good work and selling it, rather than the tedious admin and management responsibilities.

People in Sittingbourne are used to people saying “No” to them. Saying “yes” to everything meant that we were able to reduce scepticism and support a much larger number of artists than expected. And for every artist who put their work on sale there were probably twice that who didn’t bring anything in, but who went away encouraged and reminded of their creative dreams.

We were grateful in particular for the opportunity to work with young people from Sheppey through the YAF project and help many of them show their work for the first time, make decisions about how to present it and price it for sale. The festival’s poster was designed and laid out in the shop with one of the young people working alongside an older experienced designer/photographer.

Several artists, regardless of age, showed and sold their art work for the first time ever in workshop34 and while selling is not the primary motivation for most people, they did feel added validation when one of their pieces was bought.

Sharing SpaceIn most spaces, one vision has to win – here we chose to help the vision emerge from hearing everyone’s point of view equally. People learned valuable skills in negotiating a common vision.

A challenge for this disparate group of artists, entrepreneurs and those who volunteered in the shop was to let everyone to do what they wanted and needed to do, but without preventing others from doing the same.

This was hard. People expected either someone to make all the decisions or else to be left to get on with what they’re doing and ignore the rest of the group. In workshop34 we encouraged them to negotiate conflicts over space usage. Whenever Lloyd was approached to decide who was right or who had the better idea, he always pushed it back to the group and got them talking to work it out for themselves. As a result, more things happened, people gained new skills in negotiation and learned to let go of their attachment to winning at all costs.

Creating Financial FlowWe didn’t want to just be a subsidised space that gave everything away. While we believe the High Street is more about health than wealth, making money is an important part of reactivating community. Many of the people involved made money, and made progress developing business ideas. We made great progress towards being self-supporting.

It was important for us to put the project on a commercial footing from the start rather than starting with everything free and then had to impose charges. Lloyd took the approach again of letting the space users lead this. We quickly established a 20% commission deal with no hanging fee for artists but whenever someone wanted to run a workshop or hire a room we talked through what they could realistically afford – most people were running events for the first time, or just starting a business and rather than put pressure on by insisting on a standard fee, we were able to work with them to find the best deal for all of us.

As it was, from the beginning of December onwards, we ended up taking just over £3500 in sales and workshop fees/room hire, three-quarters of which went directly to the artists, makers and workshop leaders.

]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/04/09/help-please-workshop34-final-report/feed/9Lloyd DavisMost Admired Creative Peoplehttp://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/04/08/most-admired-creative-people/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/04/08/most-admired-creative-people/#commentsWed, 08 Apr 2015 12:44:30 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2223Continue reading Most Admired Creative People→]]>I’ve been writing a thing about Creative Collaboration – it’s a subject I’ve spoken about a lot and I often assert that all creative work is dependent on more than one person and that nobody does amazing creative work on their own – we just have a habit of ascribing genius to individuals because, well, individualism. See I’m never going to do a PhD :)

Anyway, it made me think yesterday when I wrote the following:
“Think of your favourite creative person, the odds are that you can quickly see that they required collaborators in one form or another even if those ‘others’ are not normally credited, whether it was a supportive spouse or life partner, a teacher, a muse, a tireless editor or a creative partner who brought something to the work that one person couldn’t achieve alone.”

And I thought, “I wonder who people would think of as their favourite creative person.”

And so I asked my Facebook friends

“Which creative person do you most admire or envy? All disciplines. All of history. Go!”

and they told me.

There were a few names that came up more than once:

Leonardo da Vinci x3
Pablo Picasso x3

Frida Kahlo x2
Miles Davis x2
Patti Smith x2

Here are the others in lazy alphabetical order of their first name (some of them only have one name!) There’s at least one married couple in there and more than a couple who are well known for not getting on very well. I haven’t counted how many are dead and how many alive. Some are characters from creative works themselves. A quick scan suggests they are mostly musicians, painters and writers, but there’s also a footballer, a chef and a carpenter. I might go back and look at the gender split – how many women chose men and how many chose women and vice versa.

I’d be surprised if you knew them all, I certainly didn’t – but I’ve added wikipedia links to help us all rise out of ignorance.

Oh and I was interested to see that people weren’t quick to go with “envy” rather than “admire”. I don’t think it’s very easy to admit to envy anywhere, even Facebook.

]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2015/04/08/most-admired-creative-people/feed/1Lloyd Davis*NEW* Sittingbourne Tuttle – #Stuttle – Thursdays 10am-midday(ish) – from 27/11/14http://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/11/19/new-sittingbourne-tuttle-stuttle-thursdays-10am-middayish-from-271114/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/11/19/new-sittingbourne-tuttle-stuttle-thursdays-10am-middayish-from-271114/#commentsWed, 19 Nov 2014 15:19:00 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2221Continue reading *NEW* Sittingbourne Tuttle – #Stuttle – Thursdays 10am-midday(ish) – from 27/11/14→]]>We’re going to bring the Tuttle format to Sittingbourne. I’m running a pop-up shop/co-working project here at 34 High Street (known as Workshop34) for the next few months and so I want a regular get together of creative minds in conversation.

Tuttle in London has been running every Friday since February 2008, it’s a place for conversation that works a bit like the internet is supposed to work. Everyone’s welcome, there is no theme to conform to, there are no speakers or people you have to listen to, there is nothing that you have to do, except turn up with an open mind and a willingness to meet other people and chat. It’s a meetup for anyone interested in creativity, collaboration, ideas, life, people, work, technology, politics, religion, philosophy… oh, anything you like, we don’t care!

There have been successful versions of Tuttle in Kent over the years too, notably Twuttle in Royal Tunbridge Wells and tuttle 101 in Rochester.

What to bring: First one especially, please bring a mug. If you have bits of furniture, office/shop equipment that are nice but not wanted where they are, let me know and we can talk about getting them here.

What to leave at home: Moans and groans. Also business cards, unless they’re really funky.

Who to bring: yourself mainly, but bring and/or send anyone you think would like it. Biting people (at least on their first visit) is severely frowned upon.

How to sign up: No need, just let me know, tweet it, facebook it, write it on your weblog.

]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/11/19/new-sittingbourne-tuttle-stuttle-thursdays-10am-middayish-from-271114/feed/0Lloyd Davis#workshop34 got the keys. Am inside!The Two Towers Challengehttp://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/11/15/the-two-towers-challenge/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/11/15/the-two-towers-challenge/#commentsSat, 15 Nov 2014 12:33:27 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2219]]>OK, here’s a little puzzle for you now that the evenings are drawing in:

Show, on a map, those areas of London from which, at street level, you can clearly see both the Vauxhall Tower and The Shard.

Entries by Christmas please.

]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/11/15/the-two-towers-challenge/feed/0Lloyd Davis7 things you (workplace folk) should know about the #futureofwork – #wtrends14http://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/10/16/7-things-you-workplace-folk-should-know-about-the-futureofwork-wtrends14/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/10/16/7-things-you-workplace-folk-should-know-about-the-futureofwork-wtrends14/#commentsThu, 16 Oct 2014 15:13:22 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2215Continue reading 7 things you (workplace folk) should know about the #futureofwork – #wtrends14→]]>I spoke yesterday at the Workplace Trends conference in London. The overall theme was Designing for Inclusion. Neil Usher (a confirmed, but lately absent, tuttler) got together a dozen fine people to present our thoughts in pecha kucha style (20 slides each, 20 seconds per slide). Under the stressful bondage of the format, I can’t be sure what I said, but the first half of what I intended to say was about coming to understand the need for less structure in working life, but that no structure at all meant nothing much would happen – that we have to introduce just enough structure to make something happen, and no more. If I remember rightly (ask someone who was there), I then I went on to talk about what people like me can tell people like them about what to expect in the future workplace.

I’m not so arrogant and narcissistic as to imagine that the future of everyone’s work will be just like mine is now, but I do believe William Gibson’s idea that “the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed” and that the ways of working that the people I hang out with are developing will become much more widespread. I have no firm evidence, just an observed trend in that direction over the last ten years, that things we do are becoming more mainstream.

So here they are:

We’ll work anywhere
We recognise that no environment will ever be perfect, but we can make the most of any space that comes along. Stop worrying about making somewhere that fits every need – keep it simple and we’ll adapt.

But not necessarily the same “anywhere” everyday
There is no single space or form of space in which people can best work. There are times when conversation is required, there are times when the group needs to work quietly side by side and then there are times when everyone needs their own private space and total isolation. So it can be anywhere, but it will not be the same anywhere all day everyday.

Allow for user-driven co-creation
Your staff are likely to be doing co-creative work outside of “work work” no matter what they do 9-5. This might not be in a traditional creative form like crafts or singing in a choir, it could just as easily be learning through the co-operative playing of a game in a virtual world or being part of the building of a world-class encyclopaedia online. We see ourselves as co-creators of our experience and of the things that matter in our world. So we’d like our “anywhere” to be partly co-created with us and we would certainly like to be able to modify it together rather than waiting for someone else to sort it out.

Remember that your people are highly connected
People in any organisation are directly and regularly connected to their customers, stakeholders and competitors and they are connected with each other too. They compare notes and they have worked in other places. They know when their organisation is cutting corners or giving them a raw deal in comparison to their friends. We want the best of what eveyone else has, but tailored through a co-creative process to our own current needs.

Flexibility means “Small Pieces Loosely Joined
No single individual or organisation has to do everything. In fact, the best environments, those most flexible and conducive to creativity, come about when they are made up of “small pieces, loosely joined“. We want to be able to pick’n’mix the elements of our working environment and be able to replace one element with another easily. We don’t want to be locked in to any one furniture solution or combination just because it seemed like the best way of doing things yesterday.

Balance homophily with diversity
We learn a great deal about ourselves through exposure to diversity in our environment. We get to see ourselves differently, reflected in the people we meet and work with. But we also like to work alongside people with whom we share common ground. Homophily means “birds of a feather, flock together”. Help us to meet and work with other people, but allow us to be with our own herd when we want to be.

Get behind tummeling
Even when you do all this, when the pieces of the puzzle are laid out perfectly, it will not work in the way you thought it would. When you gather people together, you never really know what is going to happen. And that is good! It’s a feature, not a bug. What you then need are a few people who will take on the role of holding the space and reminding people what they are there for. This is not facilitation or management, not telling people what to do, rather, it is being the conscience of the group and creating a field in which the group can explore what they are there to do. It requires a special sort of person – one who combines calm presence with the ability to motivate and inspire. We call these people “tummelers” which comes from the Jewish tradition of having someone who encourages participation in festivities. You know these people, they are the ones among you who not only *can* herd cats, they positively enjoy doing so. Insist that your spaces include a tummeler.

]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/10/16/7-things-you-workplace-folk-should-know-about-the-futureofwork-wtrends14/feed/4Lloyd DavisClubshttp://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/10/09/clubs/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/10/09/clubs/#commentsThu, 09 Oct 2014 20:05:39 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2213Continue reading Clubs→]]>When #tuttle was attracting a crowd of about 80 people every week at the ICA, the old-school networking entrepreneurs came a-sniffing. “How can you do this?” they asked. “You’re supposed to keep people out, that’s how you make people want to join, then when you’ve created sufficient demand, people will be eager to pay to get in, but still you keep it exclusive and the demand and the prices grow and grow.” And I just said “I don’t know. I can’t be bothered with all that. If people want to come, let them.” And they continued to make a living at it and I didn’t make a bean. And I’m happy with that.

On the other hand, there were people who came and said “Oh, I know how to get you more people here. You should be having speakers and a theme every week and have a website so that people can join in online.” And I said “No. That’s not what I’m interesed in, thank you. If people want to come who can’t come, then they can start their own.” If I was feeling polite.

I’m still attracted to the idea of a club that’s just as big as it needs to be. It’s not for everyone and it’s not trying to be. But it’s also not keeping anyone out if they want to be a part of it as long as we’ve got space in the room. And if we don’t have enough space, perhaps we need a bigger room or another branch.

I’m thinking about this because I’ve been looking at ello which seems to want to be Facebook, but nicer, without the ads, but with no clear sense of what’s going to support mass participation other than ads and avoiding the question of how the current investors are going to make their money. There was quite a kerfuffle when it arrived, because we do seem to want something other than Facebook and Twitter and the rest, but this really doesn’t seem to be it.

And then along comes tilde.club which feels much closer to #tuttle territory. It’s not meant to be a social network. It’s just a server with a bunch of user accounts, like the account I had at University until 1996. Many of the users are re-creating that early web vibe, but others are just using it for writing again and the social aspects of simply writing and linking to other people’s writing are being explored and rediscovered. All just on one server. And only restricted because there’s only so many people you can support. If you want to do your own, then you can do your own.

When I suggested we call the London Social Media Cafe “The Tuttle Club” there were a few people who bristled at the word “Club” but I think it’s what I want. A club that has me in it. And my friends. And some people that I don’t know yet, but might find interesting to talk to.

]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/10/09/clubs/feed/0Lloyd DavisQuotidienhttp://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/10/09/quotidien/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/10/09/quotidien/#commentsThu, 09 Oct 2014 19:30:43 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2211Continue reading Quotidien→]]>I just caught myself thinking that I might settle down with a nice cup of tea and watch the telly.

This isn’t quite as bad as it once might have been. I wouldn’t actually have been watching a broadcast on BBC1 or anything like that. I’d have been choosing from something on Netflix. Or perhaps iPlayer. But at least I would have been choosing what I watched unlike the old days when we watched what they wanted us to watch.

Shocked at my unconscious move to passive consumption, I thought about writing something here. In fact I thought about a whole load of stuff I could write. And then I got to thinking about my favourite old blogging fantasy. That after a hard day’s work, I would eat my dinner and then instead of watching telly, I’d sit down and write about my day, about the things I’d thought and noticed. Every day. Well apart from, you know, a few days here and there. But really that I would have that sort of routine, that sort of everyday life where you do things every day.

And I don’t really. Or if I do, I resist doing things every day in order to avoid the pain of having an everyday life.

So I opened up my laptop and then before I knew it, I was scrolling through Facebook. Which, of course, is just a very slow crowdsourced version of watching telly. And then I finally got round to writing something and this is it. No wonder I don’t do it every day.

]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/10/09/quotidien/feed/0Lloyd DavisHitchedhttp://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/09/10/hitched/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/09/10/hitched/#commentsWed, 10 Sep 2014 22:00:26 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2209Continue reading Hitched→]]>Oh My! I imagine that most of the people who read here will have seen the news last weekend or known anyway, but I got married to Laura Musgrave on 5th September. And I’m chuffed to bits.

I first got married in 1990 just before I turned 26. I thought it was all about us – which means that primarily I thought the day was about me, but then I suppose that at the time I thought my life was all about me anyway.

Life has changed me. Nearly 25 years later, I’ve done it again. I’m privileged to come at it this time with that experience of what marriage is really about and what life is really for. I’m very grateful for the first time round, and in particular, the two beautiful children that came from it – two young people of whom I’m immensely proud today.

Nick Holder was my best man and we went on a walk in the woods a few weeks ago as part of my “stag”. He asked me while we walked, why I was getting married. I said that I liked it, as a state of being. I prefer it, as an idea, to living together without a public declaration and ritual and even all the legal stuff. I like us being a unit – two and one. I like introducing “my wife”.

It’s taken me ten years to come back to this position. When I first moved out in 2005, I was quite sure that I’d spend the rest of my life alone, or in long-term relationships that didn’t involve public commitment and children. But that has changed very very slowly, over the years.

I’ve done a lot of growing up since then and so a couple of years ago, after Laura and I had been together for a year or so, and despite me being on the road at the time, I felt ready to say that, although I didn’t know how it might work out, I would very much like to spend the rest of my life with her and have another family.

A year later I asked her formally, in the Starbucks in the King’s Road which was the place she claimed she first took a shine to me. And now here we are, sitting in San Francisco on the first day of our honeymoon.

Lots was said at the wedding about love and marriage, what it means to us and to all the people who were there. Expect more details in the in-between blogging time I get while I’m away, but my wife has just arrived in the coffee shop!

And thank you, and much love to all those who helped me get here.

]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/09/10/hitched/feed/3Lloyd DavisBlog like nobody’s readinghttp://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/07/17/blog-like-nobodys-reading/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/07/17/blog-like-nobodys-reading/#commentsThu, 17 Jul 2014 17:33:52 +0000http://perfectpath.wordpress.com/?p=2207Continue reading Blog like nobody’s reading→]]>I’ve been trying to do this of late – I named my fargo blog with the phrase as a strapline. The idea is to just write freely instead of thinking about who’s reading and what they’re thinking. New bloggers often worry about who’s going to read what they write. We remind them that actually it’s much more likely that nobody will read it.

What matters much more is that I do write it.

I’ve been seduced a little this week by the new Twitter analytics, but really it’s just another set of bar charts for me to worry about. I tweeted out an insight though, earlier. I have 5k followers, more than many, fewer than many. There’s a metric that shows up in the analytics which is “impressions” it’s the number of times your tweet was seen by someone else – regardless of whether it was retweeted or not. For me, so far it seems that between 200 and 300 people are seeing each tweet. Obviously that’s not the same 2 or 3 hundred people each time, but it showed me what Twitter’s really like and so in a way it’s reassuring to see so few, because it puts the “engagement” into context. Engagement is when someone clicks on a link or looks at an image or looks at your profile or something, it’s also retweeting and favouriting. So if I tweet something and 5 people “engage” with it, if I’m counting that as 5 out of 5000 followers, it’s pretty shit, but if it’s 5 out of the 250 people who have interacted with it, it feels a lot better. I’m still being ignored by 4995 people, but being not engaged with by 245 people feels much better.

It’s insane. What a crazy thing to be sitting around thinking and writing about, when look, look at it outside, look where I am, look in the fridge at the lovely stuff I’m having for tea, remember the fun conversation I had with Dan this morning that’s going to be podcast tomorrow, remember the love in her eyes when she came back from the gym, go get some iced water and sit on the balcony and watch the river go by.

The RFH was being used today for a graduation ceremony. That chimed with my recognition that some people have “graduated” from Tuttle and that’s worth celebrating.

“MayDay Rooms is a safe haven for historical material linked to social movements, experimental culture and the radical expression of marginalised figures and groups. It offers communal spaces to activate archives’ potential in relation to current struggles and informal research, challenging the widespread assault on collective memory and historical continuity. MDR is located in Fleet Street, Central London, but is informally linked in inspiration, collaboration and practice with an international network of common and concurrent initiatives.”

Thinking about archives as a way of seeing oneself through media but also recontextualising yourself – which I take to mean seeing what different things in you are reflected by your contact with archive materials.

Personal stories are much more interesting than the facts, which can be discovered for oneself – if you’re telling me a story about a stone that you picked up on a beach, the geology of the stone is the least interesting part (unless within that there is some personal connection).

There are always lots of little social things going on that no-one knows about.

What alternatives are there in the space between mesh networks and the “legacy” Internet?

Instagram and Twitter as a treasure hunt. We leave trails of where we’ve been, what we’ve seen, what we’re doing for others to pick up and enjoy and follow the path.

What’s this #tuttle reboot all about? What is it that needs to be revived, what’s it for, what’s it supposed to do, has it done it already?

Watson at IBM – looks amazing, looks like magic – do those explaining how it works really understand it themselves? What is the complexity under the surface? How much do you get to know once you’ve “signed on the line that is dotted”?

]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/07/04/040714-today-at-tuttle/feed/1Lloyd DavisOn the other side of the glass #tuttleHelp me reboot #tuttlehttp://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/07/03/help-me-reboot-tuttle/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/07/03/help-me-reboot-tuttle/#commentsThu, 03 Jul 2014 10:55:49 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2199Continue reading Help me reboot #tuttle→]]>The most frequently asked question about #tuttle is: “Is it still going?” To which the answer is “Yes, still Fridays, still 10am-noon, still no agenda, currently on Level 5 at RFH”

And. We operate on a much smaller pool of people, which means the possibility of more intimate conversation (I’ve had some doozies!), but also the risk of stagnation that lack of diversity brings.

I am often reassured that “it’s not about you, Lloyd, it’s about me: I have work to do; I don’t manage my time well enough; I’d love to come but it’s just too far if I haven’t anything else in town; I’m always thinking about coming, it’s just that…”

I’m also reminded regularly that people do still long for space to be themselves, where no-one tells them what to do and they can talk about what they want to talk about without an expected outcome/output/powerpoint/post-its on the wall. A thing that’s not about the thing but about the relationships and potential for things to happen that builds over time.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but talking to Jon Hickman for his article on Social Capital has helped me remember what a good thing this can be and how I don’t believe the time for it has passed. Stories about online social networks spying on us and manipulating our streams to study our emotional responses as well as the constant drip, drip of acquisitions that lead either to sunsetting or unscrupulous use of personal data – these are the things we’ve talked about and organised against in places like #tuttle but my experience of the current crop of events is that these conversations are still squeezed into the breaks and space after the main speaker rather than the focus of getting together in the first place.

So how can you help?

Firstly, you can just come along. No need to register or submit your details anywhere, just turn up at the Royal Festival Hall sometime between 10 and noon and chat (and bring someone with you if you want).

Secondly you can help me develop a sustainable model for me keeping this thing going and making it better over time. The main issue has always been that while others have built working relationships and created opportunities, I’ve had a massive injection of Social Capital which is hard to pay the rent with. I also don’t really want to take money from outside the community while understanding that some people in the community don’t have a lot of money to give.

I’m looking at Patreon as a micro-patronage platform for subscriptions toward developing and rebooting the event. Some of you have kindly “micro-patronised” me before – the difference this time is that I’d want to tie levels of support to some pretty specific goals and to allow for much lower donations per person. Patreon offers both these functions.

In connection with that, you can help me by suggesting what those goals might be. So far I’ve got:

Working with new venue(s);

Creating an online presence more worthy of 2014 than 2007;

Reviving Tuttle Consulting;

Setting up a marketplace for #tuttlers to sell their wares;

Doing other themed events for the community.

But I need to know what else? What did you always wish would happen either at or between #tuttles if only somebody could take the time to?

So let me know what you think about any of that: Yes? No? Yes. but do it another way? No, but have you ever thought of?

Thankyou!

]]>http://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/07/03/help-me-reboot-tuttle/feed/4Lloyd DavisPodcast: @jonhickman asked me about social capitalhttp://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/06/25/podcast-jonhickman-asked-me-about-social-capital/
http://perfectpath.co.uk/2014/06/25/podcast-jonhickman-asked-me-about-social-capital/#commentsWed, 25 Jun 2014 15:58:04 +0000http://perfectpath.co.uk/?p=2195Continue reading Podcast: @jonhickman asked me about social capital→]]>Jon Hickman is writing an article on the crowdsourced journalism site, Contributoria on whether or not you can live on social capital. He kindly thought that my experiences wandering around the United States of America might provide some insight, so we had a chat. Even if you’ve heard me talk about it before, you might find it interesting to hear it from this perspective. I’ll certainly be fascinated to compare this conversation with how Jon’s article turns out.

It coincides nicely with the fact that I finally got round to releasing Version 0.1 of the Please Look After This Englishman e-book – this one contains all the blog posts before, during and after the trip. I intend to refine and develop this product (hence the Version 0.1 tag) so if you do download it, I’d love to hear your ideas for other ways to present the story or particular parts that you’d like to hear more about.

Update: The e-book is now also available on Amazon if that makes it easier for you. Although it costs you more plus Big A take a greater percentage and take longer to pay me than Gumroad. Of course, it’s not about the money! :)

We recorded this early last week, but I’ve been holding it back because I didn’t have time to listen to it in order to come up with the usually obsessively and irrelevantly detailed show-notes. But that’s stupid. So for this episode, if there’s anything in there that you want to know more about and but can’t Google, leave a comment and I’ll see if I can explain.

The gist of it all is this: Lloyd’s just been to the osteopath and so is feeling a bit groggy. Fans of the chronic self-deprecating chunter about tech(ish), social(ish), community(ish) matters are unlikely to be disappointed.